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Warning: Mild spoilers for the first season of Gentefied ahead.
It may only be February, but I find it difficult to imagine that “The Mural,” the fifth chapter of Netflix’s new series Gentefied, won’t land somewhere on my list of best television episodes of the year. Its A-plot feels like a short story, following Ana Morales (Karrie Martin), a queer Latinx woman and aspiring artist, as she paints a big mural in the heart of Boyle Heights, her rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood. It’s one of the first paying jobs she’s ever had doing what she loves, complicated by the fact that she was hired by Tim (TJ Thyne), a wealthy white gay man buying up property all around her Boyle Heights district in hopes of “beautifying” it to attract a new (read: whiter, richer) crowd, raising property values in the process. But who is Ana to turn down a fat check — let alone a chance to show her art on a large scale?
Yet it’s also an opportunity for Ana to represent her queerness in her hometown, and she produces a stunning mural of two male luchadores (one with an “Amor” arm tattoo) passionately kissing. It’s a striking and powerful image, but one that isn’t exactly accepted by others in her community. When Ana describes the concept to two self-described cholos, she mentions that it will be “browner and less doomed” than Bonnie and Clyde; when they see the final product, they sneer, “Browner and gayer? She missed the gay part.” Other people walk by it and scoff. Most devastating is the response from Ofelia, an elderly woman whose liquor store is attached to the wall where Ana’s mural now sits. Though Ofelia never expresses any real personal offense, she does admonish Ana’s choice to paint something so potentially incendiary without her advanced permission, especially once many of her usual customers start boycotting her business under the false pretense that this was a message she wanted to send.
The episode presents an impressively nuanced depiction of the issues that surround gentrification. As viewers, it’s easy for us to see just how insidious Tim is as a person — he embarrassingly injects Spanish phrases like “sí se puede” into his vernacular, condescendingly calls women “honey” and “my love,” and when all is said and done, throws cash in Ana’s face whenever he wants her to stop talking. But it’s just as easy to understand why Ana would be willing to indulge him. Not only is he offering her money she could never have dreamed of before, but he’s doing so while actively uplifting those aspects of her art she might have once felt discouraged to embrace. As he tells her right after Ofelia chews her out, “As queer people, we have to stop asking for permission to exist in this world.”
Gentefied effectively balances these contradictions throughout its ten-episode first season. Created by first-generation Chicano writers Marvin Lemus and Linda Yvette Chávez and executive produced by Ugly Betty’s America Ferrera, the show follows the extended Morales family as they slowly try to adapt to their changing surroundings. There is the aforementioned Ana, of course, as well her longtime girlfriend Yessika (Julissa Calderon), her precocious little sister Nayeli (Bianca Melgar), and their overworked seamstress mother Beatriz (Laura Patalano). There are Ana’s two warring cousins, the wealthy-raised aspiring chef Chris (Carlos Santana) and the literature-obsessed Erik (Joseph Julian Soria), who spends much of the season trying to convince his on-again-off-again pregnant girlfriend Lidia (Annie Gonzalez) that he would be a good father. And overlooking them all is Pop (Joaquín Cosio), a widowed patriarch whose taco restaurant, Mama Fina’s, is at the heart of all the gentrification drama.
